When a Hackaday article proclaims that its subject is a book you should read, you might imagine that we would be talking of a seminal text known only by its authors’ names. Horowitz and Hill, perhaps, ...

Today pocket transistor radios manufactured in the 1950s are very collectable. Some models are highly sought after by collectors and regularly sell for hundreds of dollars. It is not uncommon to find ...

These days, an iPod with two ear buds typically provides portable music for the young and young-at-heart. Half a century ago, however, it was one plug in the ear, and the other end of the wire ran to ...

So What Was the Transistor Good For? Transistors may have been useful to the phone company and to a handful of scientists building computers, but that wasn't enough to build an industry. Companies ...

If you cultivate an interest in building radios it’s likely that you’ll at some point make a simple receiver. Perhaps a regenerative receiver, or maybe a direct conversion design, it’ll take a couple ...

It wasn’t big, it could cost about $500 in today’s terms, and it was utterly revolutionary. Today it might not seem like much, but this little gadget changed radio — and arguably youth culture itself ...

Individual words are basic communication tools that when put together in the proper order can express thoughts and ideas. When you put certain words together, they can be magical. Back in the 1960s, ...

Texas Instruments' Regency TR-1, the first commercial transistor radio, on display at the American History Museum Photo courtesy museum For the first 50 years after its invention, the radio was ...

Happy 50 th birthday to the transistor radio. For the last half-century we’ve embraced transistor radios, loved them, made them part of our lives and even took them for granted. But back in 1954, the ...

A handheld AM or FM radio. All handheld radios, as well as desktop radios, use transistors, both discrete as well as contained in chips. The transistor radio was one of the first consumer devices that ...